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Object lesson
Boy Gets Girl stalks stalking
BY CAROLYN CLAY
Boy Gets Girl
By Rebecca Gilman. Directed by Charles Towers. Set by Susan Zeeman Rogers. Costumes by Polly J. Byers. Lighting by Dan Kotlowitz. Sound by Jeff Jones. With Gloria Biegler, Kyle Fabel, Monique Fowler, Breean Julian, Richard Snee, Jim Mohr, and Derek Stone Nelson. At Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, through November 16.


Rebecca Gilman has her fingers on so many hot-button issues that she might as well be playing a chord. The 1999 Spinning into Butter examines the soul of a white, liberal college administrator who’s forcibly plugged into her own racism. The early The Glory of Living is about the making of a serial killer. Boy Gets Girl, which debuted at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2000 and is seen here in its New England premiere, charts the mounting helplessness of a young woman who finds herself stalked in the wake of a blind date. Neither as subtle nor as surprising as Spinning into Butter, the play — which, unable to decide whether it’s a thriller or a polemic, follows a measured first act with a more lurid second one — nonetheless manages to be cautionary and entertaining at the same time. And artistic director Charles Towers’s production for Merrimack Repertory Theatre is as well turned out as the lead character in the first scene — before, thanks to the Spin-and-Martyish young man with whom she’s having an awkward beer, she’s unable to go back to her apartment for clean underwear.

Theresa Bedell, the play’s disarmingly unadorable heroine, is a staff writer at a New York magazine who, though it has nothing to do with her plight, probably does have intimacy issues. In the first couple of scenes (Friends with an edge), she’s been set up with a computer programmer who’s clean-cut and seems nice enough but is much too eager to become part of a couple and besides does not interest her. (She’s a connoisseur of literature; he thinks Edith Wharton is Winona Ryder’s screenwriter.) When she tells him so, self-depreciatingly declaring herself "not good relationship material," he quickly turns from America’s Florist into Mr. Goodbar: repeated flower deliveries are followed by incessant voice mail, the violation of boundaries, and sexually framed threats of violence.

What Gilman does artfully is to suggest, even in the civilized opening moments, that Tony suffers from excessive neediness and is hiding a macho mama’s boy behind a kneejerk-feminist veneer. And she does not flinch from the difficulties the prickly Theresa presents — they’re dispersed like unaimed machine-gun fire once Theresa is threatened. Towers suggests in a program note that the rent in Theresa’s security, and the vulnerability it triggers, are like those felt by all of us post–September 11. But the play was written before that and is intended as no such metaphor. Moreover, it’s marred by the playwright’s term-paper effort to pinpoint stalking as a natural outgrowth of sexual objectification and fantasy gratification in the culture, whether inspired by Russ Meyer films or The Graduate.

It’s not that such theories are bogus. But in putting them forward, Gilman compromises her characters to accommodate her politics. In what amounts to high comedy but low credibility, Theresa is assigned to profile a Meyer clone named Les Kennkat (played with bravura ease by Jim Mohr) who insists that his mammary-propelled films "celebrate women." No professional reporter, even one under stress, would resort to the emotional line of comment and questioning Theresa does in pursuit of Gilman’s agenda. And her magazine colleague Mercer Stevens is saddled with some unlikely speechifying and confessions to make us understand that even nice males are subject to base sexual prerogative.

That said, the Merrimack production, displayed with contemporary flair on Susan Zeeman Rogers’s Rubik’s Cube of a set, shows the play to advantage. Gloria Biegler is a reserved, driven Theresa for whom in the end sharing a bit of a soon-to-be-erased past with friends is a sign of growth through adversity. In addition to registering as polite yet spiny, Biegler charts the journey of her character from cool, sharp containment to shrewish strain and discombobulation. Also notable is Richard Snee’s empathetic if obtuse turn as Theresa’s editor, Howard Siegel — it’s especially impressive since Snee came aboard as a last-minute replacement for W.T. Martin, who was taken ill. (And mightn’t his excellence suggest to Towers, whose program note bemoans a loss of visiting-actor housing, that there is a tangle of local talent at his feet?)

The other parts present less opportunity for rounded characterization, though Kyle Fabel aptly illustrates the unexpectedness of rejected suitor Tony Ross as an anger-fueled sociopath, Derek Stone Nelson gets Alan Alda points as the sympathetic yet berated Mercer, and Breean Julian as fishnet-stockinged young assistant Harriet pertly personifies a woman’s complicity in her objectification. As for Mohr’s Les, who unashamedly hawked his actresses’ "attributes," he is, in Theresa’s own begrudging words, "kind of funny in a totally offensive way."


Issue Date: November 7 - 13, 2003
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